Sound Studies/Music Studies

In the past two decades, "sound studies" emerged as a major field of inquiry in the social sciences and humanities. Understood as an important theoretical alternative to visual studies of media and society, sound studies has unearthed repressed histories of sound and listening and has situated the ear as a major instrument in the production of social, cultural, and scientific knowledge. This seminar focuses on key issues in sound studies, especially as those issues relate to musicology. We read canonical texts as well as considering new directions for the field. The seminar focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.